Bioshock Infinite on PC requires 14GB download

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Few things in the gaming world can be as frustrating as holding a physical copy of the game in your hand and still have an obstacle between you and playing it. For Bioshock Infinite PC DVD copies, you may find yourself waiting quite awhile after installation before it’s ready to play.

One of the crowning achievements of the creation process that has been revealed in the latest Bioshock game is the variety of machines it can be played on. The Xbox 360 and PS3 ports of the game each offer a trip to the sky city of Columbia in as high a quality as they can muster, but the PC version of the game consumes a whopping 17GB of space on your hard drive.

The reason for the bulk of that, as has been explained by Irrational Games, comes in the form of incredibly high resolution graphics you get if you play the game with Ultra settings. If you purchased a DVD copy of the game, you’ll find yourself with three discs in your pack for the installation. For some reason, once you authenticate the game with Steam, it starts downloading instead of pulling data from those DVDs.

Several Bioshock Infinite hopefuls found that their physical copy of the game was asking them to download 14GB of data after about 25 minutes of installation from the physical media. Since authenticating with Steam is a requirement with Bioshock Infinite, the service must be on during the who installation process. After the first DVD is finished, Steam hijacks the install and begins downloading the rest of the content instead of asking for the next disc in the series. The extra 14GB of content is being pulled from Steam on launch day, which must be very bandwidth intensive for Valve. As a result, your game is going to take quite a bit longer to finish installing than it would have had the included discs been used.

On any other day, this probably wouldn’t be an issue for most. Unfortunately, not only is it launch day but users with less than optimal internet connections will find this process excruciating. The install, which should have taken less than an hour, could be magnified to several hours as a result of Steam deciding that you’d rather download the game from them.

Many users already purchase from Steam by default, and on launch days rely on the pre-install method provided to them to make sure there’s no problems. The rest of us, regardless of why, aren’t going to have a great experience at the hands of Steam with Bioshock Infinite, unless of course this issue gets rectified.